SERVICE MANAGEMENT, SMAAS, SIAM

28 August

Gartner-Nexthink is all the Hype!

IT support and service is evolving. As noted by Data Center Knowledge, application performance monitoring (APM) solutions are now rapidly transitioning into what research firm Gartner calls “Digital Experience Management” or DEM.

But what exactly is DEM? Think of it as changing the ultimate metric, shifting it from the relatively static reporting of application status and performance to the user experience — what type of performance and network issues are end users experiencing in real time, and how can IT respond before small problems become big headaches and business productivity takes a hit?

On the Hype

Gartner’s new focus on DEM and real-time workspace analytics is clear even from a cursory look at the research firms new hype cycle analysis. As noted by the recent Hype Cycle for IT Performance Analysis report, DEM has a “high” benefit rating, adolescent maturity and currently enjoys 5 to 20 percent market penetration. According to both the Hype Cycle for Unified Workspaces and Hype Cycle for Backoffice Analytic Applications, meanwhile, Workspace Analytics, another evolution of APM, enjoys similar benefit ratings and maturity but only 1 to 5 percent market penetration. Plateaus in both DEM and Workspace Analytics are expected in the next two to five years, meaning companies can expect significant growth in both vendor variety and capabilities across the industry.

Moving Up

Across all three Hype Cycle reports, Nexthink is mentioned as a “sample vendor” that aligns with Gartner’s emerging IT categories. Here’s a closer look.

Workspace Analytics — The Gartner reports define this workspace analytics as “using data from an instrumented workplace to help achieve a range of objectives such as better workforce productivity. Workspace analytics is the collection of data across multiple assets to extract meaningful and actionable insights to provide a richer user experience. While Gartner notes that “no single vendor provides all the analytical tools yet”, Nexthink’s real-time end-user management software provides the foundational data required to effectively merge digital business transformation with C-suite objectives.

Digital Experience Management — Here, the focus is on performance analysis which “supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine”. Historically, these kind of analytics relied on discrete, internal user interactions with secure network services, but in a world now dominated by always-connected end-users both inside and outside corporate networks, traditional monitoring can’t keep pace.

While Gartner notes that component pieces of DEM have been in existence for more than a decade, there’s a growing need to combine multiple data sources across applications, endpoints, web pages, social media feeds and APIs to create a unified, interactive and responsive IT support environment. Nexthink is uniquely suited to leverage this hype cycle by integrating endpoint collectors, end-user feedback and cloud intelligence into a real-time analytics platform that lets companies discover what’s happening across their IT infrastructure where and when it happens.

CIO puts it simply: To really “see” data, companies need to merge multiple sources and effectively interact with the results, in turn enabling them to take advantage of IoT-enabled, mobile-dominated IT environments. So it’s no surprise that Gartner’s hype cycles point to a rise in DEM and workspace analytics solutions — Nexthink’s cutting-edge platform is ideally positioned to help businesses implement effective workspace analytics, improve the end-user experience and enable enterprise digital transformation.